A comprehensive website about emunah and core Torah concepts, with analysis and explanation of the writer’s personal growth experiences in Avodas Hashem and understanding of our relationship with HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

Down with zuhama Up with tzelem elokim

Reaching for Meta-Cognition to transcend natural reactions

The goal of putting together these resources is to help those seeking to do so to redeem our free will from being captivated from thinking the thoughts in our subconscious. Our will is engaged with pursuing our goals but what is our true identity? Torah teaches us that what we will is often pursuing false pleasures, false images, which feel like us because of the way they develop from childhood as our “starter” identity.

The yetzer hara “steals” our intellect and confuses us as a result of having eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This becomes our natural thinking.(see 5. understanding the design below)

Consider the possibility.. If we do not believe sheker about ourselves…in other words if we truly believe that we are not our flaws.. would insults hurt? Consider further that what we believe about ourselves is often an interpretation made by a young mind before the prefrontal cortex developed. Yet it is imprinted within us for a lifetime, there for us to struggle with and restore to olam haba consciousness.

2. The opportunity that Torah teaches us we have – Inspiration to reach for meta-cognition

The koach of our soul and the soul of whatever animates our challenge has within it hidden divine creative energy (tohu) available for us to redeem (return to Hashem, elevate). Listen to this discussion of what a soul is, based on a Malbum shiur given by Rabbi Cable how we understand hearing shofar.

3 .What tools does Hashem give to us with which to reach meta-cognition

We are given free will to choose to make a causative effort.

We can use speech to pray to Hashem to please help us resist expressing this pattern.

The mitzvahs of love Hashem and awe of Hashem – our effort to connect to Hashem using His gifts of love and chochma

Please accept back from us all of the divine creative energy, the force within it, and please heal it of the falsehoods.

Please give all of the divine spiritual energy back to us as olam haba consciousness of Hashem so that we feel His Love and Mercy and thereby may serve Hashem by revealing His Love and Mercy.

Explanation of steps:

By feeling love and awe for Hashem, we open a “counter-magnet” to the natural pulls on our thinking. Hashem then adds His love and mercy and helps so that the divine spiritual energy in our heart “runs” to Him for healing, and then He “returns” it to us as pure olam haba consciousness/compassion

4. Our opportunity to be like Hashem – inoculate ourselves from bread of shame

Taking the opportunity to use these tools is our opportunity to be like Hashem and reconstitute olam haba consciousness. This is the purpose for the world, for having causative free will and the power of speech and for life itself- see Rabbi Mendel Kessin

5. Understanding the design of the world, of mankind, of the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in terms of Hashem’s desire to give us pure good

Our “babyish” responses from when we are young are the thinking of the zuhama, the snake, that when rattled, strikes with a poisonous bite.

Parents teach their children ways of processing our natural responses so we have more civilized thoughts to turn to in order to respond and cope. But if we are only told no, don’t do that, it is bad – disciplined and criticized, blamed or shamed – we may stop the negative striking but we are still left with our thinking – thinking the thoughts of the zuhama, AND feelings of shame for it, because our natural responses not only remain immature but also become attached to feelings of inadequacy or being “bad”(see story of the drummer https://www.dropbox.com/s/78xga9si4t8xeox/VID-20180906-WA0002.mp4?dl=0)

We may become so acclimated to doing so that we do not suspect that these messages are not our true essence.

Discerning the difference, striving for truth, is the battle with the deceiver that Rabbi Dessler teaches in his discourse on free will.

Are we confusing being a giver – justifying our destructive actions as compassion or rightness – with something we are subconsciously trying to take?

It is a great blessing to pierce the falsehoods and each year, to go toward piercing the falsehoods in our lives on a deeper level.

We are not sensitive to how deeply we need to take this, to places we may never have thought to challenge. I think our tendency is to rationalize our comfort with taking a damaging posture and giving expression to damaging actions on the basis of fearing folding to evil..ask – is it true? Which is the real evil?

6. The design sets up the battlefield in our hearts for the struggle of good and evil

The task of guarding our soul is the battleground where we are created to strive.

We are created to choose to express tzelem elokim.

We have the opportunity to be G*d-like and resolve what we need to so as to not feel shame for all eternity, by being a giver to Hashem, choosing to submit the divine creative energy to Him rather than place our thoughts in the confusion filled with falsehoods and use it to express something damaging.

7. What is our true primal will

Do we wish to help the yetzer hara survive or do we wish for our tzelem elokim to survive for all eternity?

Once this insight is accomplished, the challenging circumstances of life take on a whole different purpose – not the outcome in time and space, but rather the opportunity to wield true causative force, the free will and speech Hashem gives us, to create positive influence with which Hashem then affects nature, according to His Will.

The simcha involved with this outweighs all other pleasures and the more we experience it, the more we know what our true will is for, because the pleasure is sought by our subconscious as well.

This is healing for our middos as well as for the world.

8. What resources are there to help gain self-knowledge and inspired consciousness?

The resources below are intended to help us spot the thinking of the zuhama….lashon hara, onas devarim, motzei shemra, sheker…and realize that the thought it wants us to think is for its own survival, not for the survival and wellbeing of our true essence, the tzelem elokim.

The survival of the tzelem elokim is up to Hashem alone. Ein od milvado.

If it is compassionate for us to take an action for our survival, it comes to us through intuition, not imagination and reactivity.Thus, recognizing the split second survival instincts’ message to think the thought of the zuhama is something we must observe, not think, so that we may free our free will from its grip. And then we have room to do avodas Hashem and metakein.

We need this “starter” identity of ego with zuhama so that we have some sense of how to use free will to serve Hashem, to understand how to use intellect to cling to Torah to bring out tzelem elokim

This is for OUR ETERNAL BENEFIT, our opportunity to be G*d-like and make a causative effort to repair the world that innoculates us against the bread of shame for all eternity.